Richard's blog

Category: social networking

  • Twitter Account Deactivated

    Twitter Account Deactivated

    Reading Time: 2 minutes

    Yesterday I finally took the step of deactivating my account, and then reactivating it, and then this morning deactivating it again. Normally when I lose interest in a social network I just forget about it and I’m done. In this situation I didn’t forget about it though. I went a step further.

    Three factors pushed me towards this decision. The first is that Musk wants to use our tweets to feed AI and I don’t want my tweets to be used that way. Logically they can’t be used, because my account is private.

    That my account has been private on and off, and anonymous since 2020 or so is a comment on how the user experience on Twitter has degraded since the pandemic. When you are trolled and flamed you go private. The paradox is that by being private people no longer see your interactions with them so you’re tweeting for nothing, and that’s a second reason to dump Twitter.

    The third reason for dumping Twitter is that if you use Pihole and ad blockers Twitter/X breaks. You eventually get kicked out of the site and have to log in again, but logging in fails via Google Login and Twitter login. The result is that Twitter is taking liberties to data that no other website requires. If I have to suspend Pihole for one site then that site becomes irrelevant.

    And Finally

    The way I used Twitter changed four years ago, after I was flamed. I was ready to give up on Twitter for a while, before Musk bought it. It had gone from being a social network filled with engagement and the desire to meet people to a complete waste of time. It’s because it was a waste of time that I tried Mastodon and the Fediverse before sliding to BlueSky and Threads. None of them have the community I’m looking for, yet.

    Twitter was a unique site, at a unique time. Now I am ready to revert to using social networks.

  • Replacing Social Media with Solitaire

    Reading Time: 2 minutes

    Recently I have noticed that I like to play Solitaire for many games in a row. It has replaced my social media habit. I know that solitaire is a solitary game but at the moment I enjoy it. I tried several versions on iOS and android but my current favourite is the Netflix version of Solitaire.

    I find that I can spend hours playing Solitaire as I watch TV and films. It seems to give more pleasure than social media. Social media no longer brings as much pleasure as it used to because the communities that I have been part of have migrated to other platforms, or given up on social media. The result is that I can spend hours scrolling, or I can play Solitaire.

    Solitaire is a game that allows you to think, and listen, as you play. It doesn’t take that much concentration to win. It’s a good means of spending time being mindful.

    The paradox is that sometimes I lose quite a few games in a row so I should be discouraged and give up, like I would if I was playing other iOS or Android games.

    A key difference is that there are no ads. It’s adverts that encourage us to give up and move on. Too many iOS apps feel like they’re designed to make us lose so that we either give in and watch apps, or give in and pay not to see ads anymore.

    With Solitaire I lose regularly with the Netflix app but I am not punished with ads and that is appreciated. Other versions give us a higher win to play ratio but I don’t mind losing. I think it might be a relaxing pass time.

    This is a game that has been on most of our computers for decades, so we have all played at some point. I expect that I will grow bored of it again, and then play some other game.

  • Bluesky Thinking

    Bluesky Thinking

    Reading Time: 2 minutes

    I have spent the last day or two playing with Bluesky and I believe that it has potential, At it’s base it’s like Mastodon, but with less anarchic user base, and fewer trolls. This could be because I haven’t spent weeks using it yet.

    Threads has a good community and good community tools but it’s part of the Facebook empire and within a few weeks adverts will appear and that will drastically feel the look and feel of the social network.

    With the arrival of ads, we will have more noise and it will require more scrolling to get anything engaging. I don’t want to be on a social network that exists for ads. I want a social network that is self-sustaning, based on rational decisions.

    I expected Flickr to implode a decade ago but it’s still around. I believe that the key to its success is that it’s a small social network by and for photographers, where people can share their photos, without noise, cult of personality and more. It has reasonable follower numbers so it’s cheaper, and lighter to run than social media giants.

    As I write this I see that Bsky already has series A funding in progress, which to me is a warning sign not to depend on the site too deeply. “We’re excited to announce that we’ve raised a $15 million Series A financing led by Blockchain Capital with participation from Alumni Ventures, True Ventures, SevenX, Amir Shevat of Darkmode, co-creator of Kubernetes Joe Beda, and others.”. That’s 15 million with 13 million users at the time, and now 20+ million users.
    Source

    I agree with the idealism of Bluesky. I don’t trust that it will be able to keep to its ideals due to who its investors are and what they stand for, I believe Bluesky will compromise on its ideals.

  • Which Social Media To Invest Time Into?

    Which Social Media To Invest Time Into?

    Reading Time: 2 minutes

    Not a single day goes by that I don’t think that now is the right time to give up on social media networks like Twitter, Threads, Jaiku, Google, BlueSky and Mastodon.

    Too Many People

    When social networks were small they were on a human scale. You could be on a forum with 20-40 people and with time you developed deep friendships with people. Now we’re speaking to a crowd speaking to a crowd. I see people with a thousand likes and a hundred replies. The chance that I will get seen, in a crowd of a hundred is small.
    This leads on to the second issue.

    Huge Investment of Time

    Social media requires a huge investment of time and energy to be worthwhile. I don’t mean for brands but for normal human beings. To be seen you need to be active, but to be active you need to find conversations that are worth having.
    This means hours and hours of what I would call gloom scrolling. Gloom scrolling is like doom scrolling but it feels like a chore, rather than a pleasure. How far do I need to scroll before I find a post worth interacting with, and when I do interact is that person, kind, mean, indifferent or other. Will I get trolled?

    Different Values

    The final point is that my social network are values to those of social media. For me Twitter, Facebook, Threads, BlueSky and Mastodon should be chat rooms and forums where discussions take place with like minded people, but more and more it feels like we’re fighting to be heard above the noise of hashtags, attention seekers, and influencers. We are no longer having personal conversations. We’re fighting for attention.

    Easy to Waste Time

    There is a fine line between social networks being social, and a waste of time. I worry that at the moment I am wasting my time. When there is a tight knit community you feel like you’re being social, you feel like you’re connecting with people. For now it feels like a waste of time.
    When Threads brings in ads there will be a mass migration from Threads to BlueSky but the question is how long BlueSky will be able to stay free, and live by the current ideals it has.
    BlueSky is still too quiet to be a thriving social network

    And Finally

    It’s an important question to ask at the moment. Social networks are currently in a state of flux so knowing whether to devote time to Threads, Bluesky or other is relevant. Creating an account takes seconds, but finding a good community takes weeks, months, or even years, and can vanish within hours or days.

    I don’t know where to invest my time.

  • The Growing Desire to Dump Social Media

    The Growing Desire to Dump Social Media

    Reading Time: 2 minutes

    I really miss the age of social networks. In the age of social networks our sphere of influence was limited to our friends, and our friends of friends. The result is that social media was a friendly conversation rather than a popularity contest.

    Over the last two days I have been looking at Threads and BlueSky and to a lesser extent Facebook and I am struck by how many thousands of posts and likes threads and posts get. In such an ecosystem we are in a popularity contest where some people get more attention than they can handle and deserve, whilst most normal people are ignored and solitary.

    Adam Mosseri wrote

    “We are rebalancing ranking to prioritise content from people you follow, which will mean less recommended content from accounts you don’t follow and more posts from the accounts you do starting today. For you creators out there, you should see unconnected reach go down and connected reach go up. This is definitely a work in progress – balancing the ability to reach followers and overall engagement is tricky – thanks for your patience and keep the feedback coming.”

    In the golden age of social media, at the end of social networks the algorithm was conversation. The more we engaged with others, the more we were visible, The more people engaged with us, the more visible we were. It was an environment where those that invested their time and attention in others was rewarded by increased visibility but also closer friendships and deeper bonds.

    They are trying to reinvent something that is simple. Communities are built around relationships and familiarity. The more algorithms break those bonds, the more likely trolling is, and with that, disengagement.

    And Finally

    What really gets to me is that social media is no longer social, Influencers are throwing stuff out and desperate to be seen and get hundreds or thousands of likes and comments, but as soon as I see that a post has a hundred likes and 20 comments I ignore it.

    Social networks used to be about conversations, but I barely see any conversations. I see monologues. The more I scroll, withoutt engagement, or a sense of community, the more I feel that “social media” is a waste of time. Finding a community takes time. I think that era has passed.

  • The Uncertain Train Journey

    The Uncertain Train Journey

    Reading Time: 1 minute

    For years I automatically took the car for everything I did, or almost. Over the last seven or eight years that habit has changed as I grew used to walking locally, and catching the train to activities. This shift in habits is due to two things.

    The first is that I met with people who take trains. If you meet with such people it makes sense to take a train with them. If you go by car the journey time might be shorter but the goodbye at train stations can be quite brutal. "Goodbye" and that’s it. The activity is over. With the train it’s just as brutal but at least you sat in silence before saying goodbye. When I say silence I mean that you listened as someone else talked.

    The second reason is that when you go to a place that is accessible by train, it makes sense to take the train. When you take the car you need to worry about parking, about speed limits, about finding the right route and more. Trains are usually on time, and connections between trains are not too bad.

    The question, as an introvert is whether I want to travel for an hour or two to walk with a group, as an introvert and talk little. I keep questioning whether a solo walk wouldn’t be the same.

    Exploring new places that I would not think of is nice. It’s good to do things with a group, but I want to find people to do things locally.

    I like that when the book group meets up I can walk a few minutes and be there, without a car, train, bus or anything else. I spend too much of my life using cars, trains and buses. It’s nice to be local more often.

  • Thoughts on the Book Blindness

    Thoughts on the Book Blindness

    Reading Time: 2 minutes

    I read Blindness last month and finished it yesterday and although it won a Nobel Prize I was not a fan of the book. I haven’t had time to digest it properly yet but I think that it was at a disadvantage.

    It explores what it would be like to live through an epidemic, but we have all been through a global pandemic now. The ideas and concepts of this book, are thus theory, rather than life experiences that we have all had.

    At first I thought "I would hate to go blind while at a traffic light and I think it would be hard" but then everyone is quarantined, which makes sense, before the entire world or at least region goes blind.

    It’s a strange book, in my eyes because it doesn’t really explore how we adapt to losing sight. It assumes that we would revert to primitive habits, rather than adapt, and preserve certain values. I don’t know whether to spoil the book or just explore ideas.

    I really think that it should have explored the change in noise, as planes, cars and trains stopped moving around. If everyone goes blind then nature and perception would evolve and change accordingly.

    We hear of the guards and soldiers but we don’t hear much about them. That’s why I think this book has a lot of "so what" moments. We’re told something but it’s left up to us to intuit the significance and relevance.

    I suspect that this book also affected my emotional well being. It’s not often that I want to stop reading a book, three quarters of the way through. I think that reading it today reminds us of the real pandemic. Reading it until 2019 would have been a theoretical concept. Now it’s vécu, tu use the French word. It’s experienced.

    I think that within three hours to two weeks of reading the book it is hard to appreciate it, but that in a month or two I will appreciate it properly.

    Some books have an impact once we have had time to digest the ideas.

  • Why I chose to Deactivate Threads

    Why I chose to Deactivate Threads

    Reading Time: 3 minutes

    This morning I woke up to people insulting me for not being an Apple fan boy on Threads. Before that I was trolled for several other reasons and the consequence is that I have now deactivated my Threads account.

    For me the web is a place where, if you agree, or if you want to offer support, but if you disagree, or don’t respect a view, you say so in a seperate thread, without trolling people. On threads if I post something positive I will get dozens of likes but very few comments. If I write something people don’t agree with, they will troll, without any context.

    Since 2003 I have owned an iBook, three mac book pros, two mac book airs, an iphone 3g, 4, 4s, SE, 8+ and SE second generation. In other words I have bought quite a few products over the years and have used Mac Pros and iMacs in a professional context.

    When I say that I don’t want to buy Apple products because they are a trillion dollar company and their products are expensive, that is not envy or jealousy. It is personal opinion, based on using computers since I was five or so years old. I have watched as computers have gone from desktop beige boxes that we could add parts to, to laptops where we could swap ram, batteries and more. I liked the Macbook Pro in 2012 and bought a 3000 CHF high spec machine at the time. I liked the Macbook air form factor too.

    What I didn’t like is that RAM was no longer user swappable. Neither were batteries. I also hated that they went from a plethora of ports to just four USB-c ports, because then I needed an adaptor to connect everything. That’s when I lost interest in Apple.

    I also lost interest in Apple because it went from being a reliable alternative to Windows, at a premium that was a different thought (Think Different-) but now, in the age of web browsing and mobile apps whether we use Windows, Linux or MacOS the result is often the same, except that we pay a premium for Apple, despite Apple having a trillion dollar valuation.

    That they have success doesn’t bother me in the least, but that my definition of computers is no longer met, and that their price is so much higher than alternatives does grate me. For less than 100 CHF I had a Raspberry Pi 5 with 8 gigs of ram and a good cooling system being as usable as a 2016 Macbook Pro.

    In the last two weeks I was excited for the new iPhone SE that will come out in 2025, until I read that it would be fifty to one hundred dollars more and larger. I am also interested in the Mac Mini desktop computer.

    In theory Threads is a wonderful social network, except that it’s driven by algorithms and algorithms tend to lead towards a culture of bullying, rather than friendship. In a healthy social environment people would aks questions and try to understand someone’s perspective instead of trolling, and insulting people.

    What gets to me when I am trolled on Threads, the Fediverse and formerly Twitter is that it’s not one or two posts in an hour. It’s several posts over 24 or more hours. The trolling lingers when we have already moved on. If it wasn’t for that it would be annoying, but no more.

    Many years ago during a Seesmeetup in Paris one person who lived in a more remote part of France said that she didn’t like Social Media because it was too chronophage, too much of a waste of time. Between the amount of posts we have to read, to find a conversation, and the constant trolling I do feel that Threads, and social media is a waste of time these days.

    As I write this part of me wants to reactivate my account but then I ask "Why, it will just be trolling?".Like at least one or two people in this Verge article I think I’m done with social media too.

    Social media isn’t as fun or rewarding as it used to be. I find myself gravitating back to Facebook. It has become the least worst.

  • NaNoWriMo and Typed Wordiness

    Reading Time: 2 minutes

    November has Arrived. With November so does NaNoWriMo. NaNoWriMo is the US National Novel Writing Month. This is the month where people spend every day writing 1,667 words per day, so that by the end of the month they have a draft of a novel. I have tried the challenge several times and completed it just once.

    The challenge is to write, and ignore the inner censor. It’s the idea of thinking "This is crap" and "this is rubbish" and continuing to write anyway. The goal of NaNoWriMo is not to come out with a polished turd. It’s to get into the habit of writing, and ignoring the reflex of stopping. It’s about allowing ideas, and concepts, and more to flow, and to get to 50,000 words.

    It’s also about not panicking. It’s easy to panic during this challenge. If you fall behind on the first day you have several hundred words to write. If you fall behind several days in a row you end up with several thousand words to write and catch up. It’s easy to think "I will never reach the word count goal, and give up. That’s why I gave up, more than once.

    The other thought we have is "But I will never re-read what I wrote and I will never edit it, so this is a waste of time. I should do something else instead.

    I prefer another challenge. Writing a three hundred word blog post every single day. It’s a less popular challenge but I think it’s a better investment of my time, and skills. It’s also a challenge that goes on three hundred and sixty five days a year. I think I need to invest time in learning how to develop characters and plot, before I attempt NaNoWriMo again. In theory when I finish writing this I could toy with that. We’ll see.

  • Toying With the Idea of Fairphone

    Toying With the Idea of Fairphone

    Reading Time: 2 minutes

    There is an inalienable truth, that within two or three years all of my mobile phones require a battery swap. With an iPhone this costs 67.50 CHF for the SE but only 28 CHF for a fairphone. In light of this it makes sense to recycle the iPhone SE and replace it with a fairphone four, that is sold for the same amount but with a cheaper, easier to swap battery.

    The issue is that when you slide from iOS to Android you need to migrate your apps, your accounts and your telegram, Signal, Whatsapp and other histories. In theory this should be easy as it may be backed up to Google Drive or a similar place. In reality if you slide from iOS to Android and back you lose your message history as you jump from platform to platform. That’s because, in the age of the cloud manufacturers want to lock us into their platforms.

    Add to this the issue of Apple Car Play and the Android equivalent. My car requires that I use iOS if I want to preserve access to Car play and that is a nuisance. It’s not that I didn’t spend years using my phone for GPS navigation, but rather that with a central console it takes seconds to do something. With a phone you need to be stopped in a parking space or at a very long traffic light.

    The key issue with the iPhone SE 2nd generation is that the battery was replaced but that the replacement battery is quite crap. The consequence of this is that the phone overheats, doesn’t charge properly, and sometimes lags, due to overheating.

    To add to this is the chance that the iPhone SE will mushroom in size and price, due in part to the proprietary modem. I chose the SE precisely because it was cheap and convenient and if it becomes expensive and inconvenient because of size then it makes sense to swap to Fairphone for the key reason I mentioned above. Swapping batteries is easy, and costs 28 CHF.

    Now we come to the fly in the ointment. The Fairphone 5 costs 500 CHF but should be supported for 5-7 years. The Fairphone 4 costs 200 less but will last until 2026, in theory, but might last longer. This negates part of the appeal of Fairphone. Having said this there is an open source OS that might be supported for longer.

    In practice my mind is made up. I want to switch to a fairphone phone as my primary phone and an iPhone SE for in car navigation and instant messaging via Signal and Whatsapp. I usually wear out a phone battery within six months to a year so it makes sense for me to migrate my primary phone use to a phone with a battery I can swap on a whim, rather than by appointment.